I just had a psychic prediction:

On May 7th, the day after the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, a gang of 100 superdelegates will announce their support for Illinois Senator Barack Obama. Leading this gang of 100 will be Al Gore, former vice president of the United States and the winner of the popular vote for President in 2000.

We have obtained advanced excerpts of his prepated remarks.

...We are Americans. The hope of the world. We are democrats. The party of enlightened fairness. We are, all of us, imperfect. But that does not mean we must accept the world the way it is. That does not mean we must think only in terms of victory and defeat. A great trait of our American character has lay dormant for far too long: our ability to dream. We have not, as a nation, taken kindly to the word "can't." But for a generation we have also protected ourselves with a cynicism that only served to shrink our ideas of what is possible.

It was the same cynicism that led many of us to take the pragmatic approach and sanction a war we believed it would be political suicide to oppose...

...In choosing our next nominee for president, we cannot, out of fear, judge our nominee solely on some vague notion of electability. Instead, we must, quite simply, elect them. We must win the argument. We must be good teachers. And with this most meaningful victory will come a mandate for change.

Without such a mandate, one more generation will be lost to the mere simulation of action.

...The next president can band-aid America’s serious risk of decline, or he can deputize a generation to reverse it. And this is why we must not hope for the self destruction of any opponent. We must defeat them fair and square.

If we don't try we will have already lost.

Just watched the first half-hour of Hillary on this week with George Stephanopoulos. George is having trouble getting much respect.

Looks like he never stopped being the battered wife of the Clinton administration.

We must come to terms with this: there is no going back to a 90's brand of peace and prosperity. That peace and prosperity came only because we procrastinated on  meaningful solutions to problems we knew were festering. We won't get anything close to that prosperity again without first INVITING a period of sacrifice and long term, structural change, both in ourselves and in our government.

This really is a change election, but in more ways than you may think. There is an awakened electorate, yes. A realization that American politics and policies are broken, and have already accelerated our long predicted decline. But also required is a willingness to change ourselves. That we need a little more fight in us. That we need to unlearn some of the comfortable truisms of the past 20 years. Just look at the housing market, or the geo-political chaos, or the consequences of unchecked globalization, or global warming and energy inflation stemming from our voracious demand for cheap Chinese goods.

We've been had.

They sure don't want anyone to pay attention to those tax returns...

Think back -- when we first heard Obama speak so refreshingly and with such uncommon intellect, we hoped what he was saying would resonate beyond the oft maligned latte crowd, but did we believe it? I was skeptical. And look how far he's come.

We should fight. We should have the stomach for surrogates to call Clinton out. But we have to have believe that the country will again come to its senses through Obama's positivity. He is the best we have at reviving one of the most important, long forgotten duties of a public servant: being a good teacher.

I love Bill Clinton. But we have to take an honest look at what the toxic Bush-Clinton years have brought us. Yes, it was that combination, Bush AND Clinton, not just one or the other, that propelled us headlong into these years of reckoning.

An erosion of standards. A coarsening of the culture. Media coaches. Publicists. Stagecraft and warcraft. There was some real progress, sure. But the rest was pure Clorox spin.

Long before George W. Bush, "Consumers" replaced "Taxpayers" (which, years earlier, had replaced "Citizens").

We didn't exactly drink it up. We had our reservations. But we went along anyway. And we didn't read the implicit fine print:

Hello, young man! If you stop spending even for a moment, it will all be over. But there's a bridge to the 21st century we're trying to build, so don't worry about all that and just sign here! You like your Playstation, don't you? Look, that young lady's taking her top off!

I graduated from college the same year the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. During the first week of my first real job, Bill Clinton bombed a remote part of Afghanistan to take out someone named Osama Bin Laden. Everyone cried "wag the dog." I'll admit, I can't remember if this was before or after the spirited debate over the word "is" and its various meanings.

There are some things both full and part-time Democrats have to face. The 90's were small time. And the 2000's would not have begun with a stolen election were it not for the apathy the 90's engendered. I didn't vote in 2000. I'm in New York. It didn't matter. But how many like me were there in Ohio? Florida??

Apathy wasn't some strange epidemic. There were reasons for it. Something important was missing.

Listen to Obama speak. If all you see are false hopes, you know who your candidate is. But if you see what I see -- an unexpected (and maybe undeserved) chance to remake our country, our culture, maybe a dormant part of ourselves -- please do whatever you can to help him on February 5th .

Our great pillars of the mainstream media better cover the latest on NAFTA-gate and cover it prominently. Now we find it originated with the Hillary camp, and she used it to attack Obama anyway.

This had an impact in Ohio. Ohio voters should know this.

The media has to do its job, not Hillary's bidding just because they're insecure about having been unfair to her.

Obama shouldn't touch a joint ticket, either at the top or bottom of said baggage carousel. He'll be dragged into old battles, inevitably have to "go to bat" for the Clintons in a way that damages him and leaves them exactly as they are: survivors, last men standing, Pyhrric victors -- and utterly incapable of changing anything.

I'm pretty angry about the past week, so maybe I won't feel this way after the dust settles and we have a nominee. Today, however, we need to ready ourselves for a fight.

This happened Sunday night. While making get-out-the-vote calls for Obama in Ohio, I asked a perfectly nice sounding man if he would vote on Tuesday. Asked if he would be supporting Obama, he said no, he would be voting Republican. Feeling a bit confident after only the fifth get out the vote call I've ever made, I asked, "any chance you can come over to our side? He's not your typical democrat."

The response was not hostile at all, but deflating nonetheless: "I just don't want to vote for him if there's any trace of Muslim in his background, especially after 9/11."

My already nervous speech began to stammer. I started saying, 'well, he's a Christian,' but then I thought to myself, 'well what would it matter if he were a Muslim.'
And I started to say it, diplomatically, "I personally don't care even if he is a Muslim, but he's stated that he's a Christian."  Cognitive dissonance on my end. A polite goodbye on the other end. The man wished me luck, sincerely, I think.

Is the Muslim hater a lost cause? The old me, the pre-Obama me, would have responded with hostility to this person and with general disappointment in our country. A tired riff on the post-2004 "I'm moving to Canada" response. But somehow, in this time, and no doubt through Obama's example, I wanted to do better. And so I wasn't angry at the man. I was simply heartsick that I couldn't convince him otherwise. Even if he were on the phone for longer, what should I have said? The argument would have been long and frustrating, about religious tolerance and winning hearts and minds in the Muslim world. Basic tenets my liberal friends and I think people should just know. An argument he wouldn't normally have time to listen to and I wouldn't normally have the energy to make. But as I thought about the candidate who inspired me to make these calls, I wanted to try. By the end of this call I was sad not that the man held those views, but simply that he hung up before I could continue.

I've never called anyone for any candidate. It's telemarketing, for crying out loud. But there is an important undercurrent to the whole Obama phenomenon: people connecting around a common purpose. And that connection doesn't feel full enough through blogging, or emailing friends who already agree with me, or clicking to give 50 bucks every time David Plouffe sends a hyper-targeted e-mail blast. Some of the messianic hysteria around Obama is ridiculous and probably damaging to him in the long run. But there's no denying that he has an ability to inspire us to do better and to leave our comfort zones.

So I started writing this to ask advice from everyone on what to say to the "Muslim thing." How can we ever get someone like that man to come around (not to mention blunt the smears that put the idea in his head in the first place)? And I still welcome that advice. But I also write to hopefully highlight a tiny nugget of how change happens. Not candidate debates, not policy proposals to help "the people," but two actual, specific people just trying to do better.

Tuesday's results are a setback to Obama. But we have to be willing to fight on, leave our comfort zones, and continue on the path of change making. We must recognize how we've been affected and ask ourselves this question: how could we possibly turn back now?